Heat a small, heavy sauté pan. When hot, add oil and toss in cashews, stirring until golden, being careful not to burn. Season with salt and pepper.

On a marble or glass tray arrange separate mounds of lettuce leaves, scallops tossed with chilies and lime juice, mango, cashews, coconut, cilantro leaves, lime wedges. Place toasted sesame oil in a small bowl with a spoon for drizzling.

To assemble: Take a lettuce leaf cup; fill with desired ingredients. Squeeze lime juice over all.

In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, melt the butter. Add the onions and sauté 5 to 7 minutes or until lightly browned. Season lamb with salt and add to the pan along with the bay leaves, garlic, thyme and curry powder. Heat the stock and add it to the lamb mixture along with the tomato sauce. Over medium-high heat bring to boil; lower heat and simmer, covered for 2 hours or until meat is tender. Remove to a heated serving dish.

To the sauce in the pan add the apple, chutney and coconut. Mix arrowroot with a little cold water and stir into the sauce. Stirring constantly, bring sauce to a boil. Add cream, lower heat and simmer for less than a minute. Pour sauce over the lamb curry. Serve with condiments and basmati rice.

From The Gourmet Cookbook, Volume I Revised, 1968

Apricot-Sherry Compote

Makes 1 1/4 cups

1 1/4 cups dried apricots or white figs, coarsely chopped

3 tablespoons sugar

3 tablespoons sherry

1/2 cup water

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

In a medium-sized pan over low heat place all ingredients. Simmer for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring frequently until sugar thickens and becomes syrupy. Remove from heat. If it seems too dry, stir in a little more water. As it rests it will assume a drier, stickier consistency.

From Katie Grebow, executive chef at Café Chloe

Dried Cherries in Red Wine Syrup

Makes 1 cup

1 cup good red wine

1 cup dried cherries

1/2 cup Port wine

2 pieces star anise

A few grindings of black pepper

1 cinnamon stick

1 vanilla bean, split in half

A pinch of ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon lemon zest

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

In a medium saucepan place all ingredients. Over very low heat, simmer for 20 minutes. Taste; if you like the flavor and consistency, it’s finished, if not, cook a few minutes more.

From Katie Grebow, executive chef at Café Chloe

A medley of tastes ... and thou

We all know the importance of ambience — dim lights with lots of candles, cello solos by Pablo Casals or the hypnotic Koln Concert by pianist Keith Jarrett. The roses are red, the tablecloth is white, the sauces should be luxuriously velvety and colored rose.

As for our denouement of cheese, chocolate and calories, choose a flat platter of marble, wood or ceramic; a variety of soft and hard cheese; fruit; nuts; crusty bread and … chocolate, pairing each one with a complicated red wine, a sweet dessert wine or champagne.

Stake out a favorite cheese store and taste each one before purchasing.

Here are chef Katie Grebow’s suggestions:

•Assemble a variety of tastes — perhaps a Saint Agur blue accompanied by a honeycomb or a small pot of dark honey. (Grebow makes lavender honey by grinding a few dried lavender buds into the honey.) The flavor of Vacherin Mont d’Or or cave-aged Grayson is accented by fresh, tart apples, purple grapes, winter pears and toasted nuts.

•Grebow takes a cup of toasted hazelnuts and a pinch of fleur de sel and blends them in a food processor with half a cup of honey.

•She surrounds Bijou goat cheese with dried figs, prunes and apricots, and serves Fleur du Maquis sheep cheese, also known as “a breath of love,” with a cherry compote, as they do in France.

•Peppery jams such as Just Like Grandma’s in Petaluma, spread on a cracker, emboldens all these cheeses.

If you’re lucky enough to have found your valentine, that’s what this day is all about.

Beverly Levitt

“You like potato and I like potahto.

You like tomato and I like tomahto.

Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.

Let’s call the whole thing off…”

(With apologies to George and Ira Gershwin)

Valentine’s Day is the designated time to dwell upon Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s well-worn words, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways … ” And when you reach the precise amount, which hopefully is substantial, do you ever wonder, if I love this person so much, why can’t we ever agree about what to have for dinner?

If it’s true that you can tell a person’s personality by his or her habits, what does that say about your relationship?

So let’s say you are madly in love with your partner, but if you decide to go out to dinner, you know he’s going to order the worst thing on the menu. Worst to you, that is. And, what if you decide to stay home and make a romantic dinner; you consult your all-time fave cookbook; and you find a recipe that makes your heart sing because it contains all of your favorite ingredients? And then you realize that most of them are on your sweetie’s “Won’t Eat!” list.

OK, so maybe this dilemma falls under the category of an Upscale Problem, so why worry about it? Isn’t the heightened romanticism over V-Day designed to exaggerate everything out of proportion? Maybe now is the time to bring it back down to size. Here’s how some special couples mine these dangerous waters and what they’re planning to do about it on Feb. 14.

For Los Angeles psychotherapist Karen Kass, “Dinner is when Michael is home.” Kass is referring to psychotherapist/screenwriter husband Michael Berlin, to whom she’s been happily married to for dozens of years, even though he entered their union with … food issues … about which she frequently reminds him.

“You know you have issues surrounding food,” Kass gently tells him.

“I don’t have issues,” Berlin indignantly defends.

“Yes, you do!” she challenges.

“Karen is always trying out new recipes,” Berlin explains. “She saves them in a blue binder notebook, and when I don’t like something, she rips it out. I know she’s trying to please me. She puts down my plate and then waits for my reaction. Most of the time it’s … not good.”

Is there a compromise here?

“There’s a difference between compromise and being compromised,” Berlin answers. “Certain foods are a comfort to me, and that’s what I want to eat. When I’m put on the spot, I feel annoyed. There’s a look on my face. I can’t hide it. I know she wants me to be adventurous, but I’m comfortable being a creature of habit. When I’m in the mood for something, that’s all I want.”

“I can’t stand it when he doesn’t like what I make,” Kass says, sighing. “To me, cooking, sewing, sitting around the dinner table is emblematic of family. It was always my fantasy.”

Is it a deal breaker?

“Absolutely not,” they both echo. “We’ve been together 37 years.”

And to ensure that the happy couple will have a victorious Valentine’s Day, would Michael be willing to make Karen dinner?

“If I want to please her, I’ll probably make … reservations,” he muses. “A romantic dinner is taking her to a restaurant that I know she likes and each of us ordering separately.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast …

“My husband and I cook together all the time,” says copywriter Jacquie Wojcik of Jacksonville, Fla. “But I have to work around his absurd allergies and my aversion to mushrooms and squishy crustaceans I have to pull apart.”

When Jacquie met her future husband, Bob Wojcik, a geologist, she learned that he was allergic to eggs and all poultry products, which were her favorite foods. Actually, that was all she knew how to cook. Bob loved shellfish; his favorite dish was shrimp and grits. Jacquie hated shellfish, especially shrimp. He savored steak; she was all about eating vegetables.

Their contrary eating habits weren’t a deal breaker even though it took a lot of recipe excavation to find something that would comprise a meal. So Jacquie decided she’d try to like fish.

When the couple ventured to Mission Bay on their honeymoon, Jacquie forced herself to eat fish tacos and since then has become moderately fond of cod, tuna and even flounder. “I started making cod fillet cooked in a foil packet with zucchini and onions. I do like it a little bit,” she said guardedly. “It’s a process.”

Still, when Bob goes out of town, Jacquie rushes to the market and stocks up on all the foods she loves — eggs, chicken, pasta — and makes herself a big bowl of pasta carbonara.

“For Valentine’s Day, we’ll each treat ourselves to our own dish,” says Jacqui. “I’ll want an omelet; Bob will savor steamed lobster and fries. But, since we both love to share, we’ll probably settle for steak and pommes frites and then argue about the side dishes.”

Every Valentine’s Day, Tami Ratliffe bakes her husband his favorite white chocolate truffle and chocolate fudge cake. The co-owner of Café Chloe in San Diego, Ratliffe will spend the day at the restaurant, first serving the Lover’s Lunch, then setting up for dinner. When things are running smoothly, she’ll grab three duck breast dinners and race home for a candlelit dinner with her 11-year-old son, Ryan Oliver, and her husband Gene.

“Gene is a mighty picky eater,” she says. “He hates herbs, onions, mayonnaise... If he spots one of these items in a dish, he’ll pull it out and arrange them in perfect piles on the edge of his plate. He wants to be sure I know he’s sacrificing for me.

“But he loves all things coconut, and when I make him this cake, he’ll devour it. He even sneaks into the kitchen at all hours and snitches another slice.”

When Katie Grebow, executive chef at Café Chloe, heard about our quest to find a solution for the “He likes potato, she likes potahto” syndrome, she apologized profusely but said she couldn’t be interviewed for this story.

“My fiancé, Frank Fagerlund, and I never fight about food,” Grebow says. “We love eating together. We eat exactly the same way — vegetarian or seafood — and have fun exploring seafood markets in search of the freshest and most flavorful. Couples spend so much time sharing meals; I don’t think I could be with someone who didn’t appreciate good food.

“When I met Frank, he didn’t know a lot about food, but he had good taste and an appreciation of culture,” she says. “Most importantly, he was willing to experiment.

“Everyone starts out not liking certain tastes. Some people have long lists of things they hate, such as cilantro, curry, strong smelly cheese. But what they don’t realize is that your taste buds change as you get older. I wish they would give items they think they don’t like another shot.”

Fagerlund’s biggest holdout, however, was cheese, one of Katie’s passions. “We’d be at a restaurant and he’d groan, ‘We’re not going to order cheese, are we?’ ”

Since the budding chef had tasted the best cheese of France and Italy during her travels in Europe, Grebow taught her future fiancé how to dissect the particular characteristics of each cheese so he could actually tell its country of origin.

She introduced him to her favorite — Vacherin Mont d’Or, a mountain cheese from the “winter milk” of cows brought down from their pastures in France and Switzerland. She also fed Frank a Speziato al Tartufo, a soft, woodsy cheese that is laced with black truffle. It has a beautiful aroma, especially since the rind is rubbed with a mixture of black truffle and cinnamon.

“Now, when we’re ordering, Frank says, ‘So, we’ll start with the cheese plate, and then what will we have?’ ”

So, what will Grebow and her fiancé do for a romantic Valentine dinner? She’ll work, says Grebow, and he’ll hang around the restaurant, observing her.